New research commissioned by ABBYY reveals the major challenges faced by transport and logistics (T&L) businesses trying to integrate sophisticated Generative AI (GenAI) technology.
The survey, conducted by Opinium, revealed that nearly one-third (30%) of businesses in the T&L sector lacked an AI policy or governance. Managers also complained that they found training harder than expected (30%) and found it difficult to integrate with business processes (25%).
“Businesses are spending money on GenAI tools that promise more than they can provide. In some cases, they don’t even need it,” says Maxime Vermeir, senior director of AI strategy at ABBYY. “Before moving forward with leveraging GenAI tools or agentic AI, companies need to first evaluate their current processes and create a visibility map of their workflow with data analytics tools such as process intelligence.”
“When training models prove more difficult than expected, pre-trained, purpose-built AI turns out to be the right solution. We’ve helped customers like a global fast food chain improve the extraction of data from thousands of lease agreements by 82% by using document AI to improve GenAI outputs,” adds Vermeir.
Key takeaways:
· Many business leaders addressed these challenges by combining other technologies, with 36% turning to process intelligence, 27% to retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and 25% to AI agents to improve outputs. More than half (54%) also invested in staff training.
· Adding these technologies contributed to 100% of T&L respondents ultimately being happy with their GenAI tools. Half (50%) saw cost savings, while 45% saw outputs more aligned to business goals and the same proportion saw better integration into existing systems.
· This is reflected in planned investment in AI for 2026, with the average budget expected to increase by 22%. Goals for GenAI use include reducing boring tasks (21%), collecting and monetising data to unlock new revenue streams, and staying ahead of competitors (both 20%) while the most cited goal was to automate tasks to speed up business processes (38%)
· The survey also revealed that more than one-third (36%) of T&L leaders admit that a driving factor for introducing GenAI was that employees were already using it on a bring your own software (BYOS) basis for personal productivity, which could impact security concerns over “Shadow AI.”
· Employees feel the technology makes them look “smarter and more professional” (37%), while nearly three-fifths (59%) say it reduces employees’ workload, 65% said it improved collaboration, and 41% said it supports creativity and innovation.
· Three-quarters (75%) of firms use the tools across most or some of the business.
· 64% use GenAI for automating document business processes (such as accounts payable), 57% for customer service, and 54% for employee productivity.
· When considering improvements to GenAI, top of T&L firms’ wish list was that it knows which processes could be improved and improve them (32%). This was followed by GenAI asking additional questions to provide a more accurate result (27%), and that it recognises any business system when deployed (27%).
